SOURCE: "The Ebony Tower: Variations on the Mythic Theme," in The Fiction of John Fowles: A Myth for Our Time, The Penkevill Publishing Company, 1988, pp. 77-99.

[In the following excerpt, Barnum analyzes the predominant themes and imagery of the works collected in The Ebony Tower.]

John Fowles's fourth work of fiction, The Ebony Tower, continues the theme of the novels in the more precise format of the short story. The working title for the collection was Variations, Fowles's intent being to show variations on the theme of his previous fiction. But since early readers found the title (and its connections) obscure, it was abandoned in favor of the present title. If, however, we consider Fowles's stated intent, we see a pattern emerging of the protagonist's struggles to take the journey toward self-discovery or individuation, the emphasis of the stories in this collection being on the bleaker aspects of failed attempts.

Also included in the collection is Fowles's translation of the medieval romance Eliduc, which, as he explains in "A Personal Note" preceding it, is connected to [the novella] The Ebony Tower in the same way that medieval romance is connected to modern fiction—as a natural outgrowth. Thus, the stories of The Ebony Tower not only demonstrate variations on the ancient theme of the quest, but also variations on the theme of Fowles's fiction.

The title story describes a quester who inadvertently stumbles into the realm of myth, only to find that he cannot rise to the challenge of the quest and is therefore ejected from the mythic landscape. The other three stories in the collection are all centered on enigmas (one of the stories is titled "The Enigma") or mysteries of modern life. These mysteries arise because "mystery" in the sacred sense no longer appears valid in modern man's existence. The movement of the stories is generally downward toward darkness, modern man depicted as being less and less able to take the mythic journey of self-discovery because he is trapped in a wasteland world that bewilders him.

David Williams of The Ebony Tower is the typical Fowlesian protagonist: well-born and bred, self-assured, and representative of his age and class. Driving through the forests of Brittany, the landscape of the Celtic romance, he is unsuspecting of the mythic encounter that awaits him. Since David's approach to life is one of "intelligent deduction," as opposed to "direct experience," he is ill prepared for the journey he is about to undertake. As a source of information, his journey will not be wasted; as a source of psychic growth, not the expressed purpose but the implied opportunity, his journey will be wasted because his rational response will prove insufficient to the challenge.

Turning off the main road into the forest lane, David comes to the "promised sign" announcing Manoir de Coëtminais: coët meaning "wood" or "forest" and minais meaning "of the monks," the sacred wood of the mythic quest. Fowles's description of David's experience within this mythic domain has similarities linking it to Robert Browning's poem "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,'" not the least of which is the association between the dark tower and the ebony tower. The differences are also interesting. While Roland fears his journey because he knows its dangers, David relishes his journey, being unsuspecting of danger. Roland is directed to the path off the main road by a "hoary cripple" who is "posted there" to point the way; David is directed by the posted "promised sign." The day is bleak on Roland's arrival, sunny on David's; but when David leaves Coëtminais, the day becomes as bleak as it is in Browning's poem. For David's departure the sky is "clouded over" and the landscape is of "dull, stubbled plains," a setting which corresponds with "the gray plain all round" and "stubbed ground" of Roland's landscape. In Roland's view "all hope of greenness" is gone, and when David leaves Coëtminais the same holds true: "an end now to all green growth." The essential difference, however, between the two journeys is that Roland has spent his life preparing for his journey and will rise to the challenge, while David has spent his life avoiding the challenge, living comfortably but superficially. When he finds himself faced with the dark tower of his existence, he cannot rise to meet it; therefore, his departure from the mythic landscape is as bleak as Roland's approach, or bleaker because Roland has at least the hope of success in the face of adversity, while David must live the rest of his life with the surety of his failure.

David comes to Breasley as an admirer of his art for its "mysterious" and "archetypal" qualities, which some critics called "'Celtic'" "with the recurrence of the forest motif, the enigmatic figures and confrontations." Breasley pretends to downplay the Celtic influence but tells David at the same time:

'Just here and there, don't you know, David. What one needs. Suggestive. Stimulating, that's the word.' Then he went off on Marie de France and Eliduc. 'Damn' good tale. Read it several times. What's the old Swiss bamboozler's name. Jung, yes? His sort of stuff. Archetypal and all that.'

In discussing the significant influences on his art, Breasley links the medieval quest with the Jungian archetypes, seeing the two as united in his work, just as Fowles unites the two strains in this story and in his fiction as a whole.

David knows that his art, as well as his lifestyle, is different from Breasley's; therefore he is not entirely surprised to meet the two girls who live with Breasley: Anne, dubbed "the Freak," and Diana, dubbed "the Mouse." Like the twins in The Magus, these two girls serve as mirror images, two halves that complement one another as two aspects of womankind. Diana, the Mouse, is described as ethereal, distant, feminine, and almost always dressed in white. Her counterpart, Anne, the Freak, is described as "aboriginal," sexual, coarse, and almost always dressed in black. Taken together, Diana and Anne, Anne's name contained within Diana's, form the archetype of the anima for David. David is attracted to the Mouse, finding the Freak somewhat offensive. His later failure to meet the challenge of the quest stems partly from the fact that he cannot accept the "freak," her sexuality, in the Mouse and respond positively to it. Breasley understands the dual nature of both girls, but his secret about the significance of the Mouse's name—"muse" with the feminine "o" drawn in the shape of a vulva—strengthens her role as an anima figure in the story, not only for David but for Breasley. Fowles ascribes to the power of the muses as well, telling an interviewer, "'I do believe in inspiration. I almost believe in muses. In fact, I wrote a short story last year that did bring the muses into modern life'" [John Fowles with Daniel Halpern, "A Sort of Exile in Lyme Regis," London Magazine (March 1971)].

Somewhat confused by his initial encounter, David feels like an outsider within the mythic domain, and he wishes his wife were with him to support his persona and protect him from the dangers of "so many ripening apples," an obvious reference to the temptation of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. At the same time, David thinks of his wife as "poor old Beth" and "predictable old Beth," revealing the nature of their relationship in its unfruitfulness. Thus to handle the confusing situation he faces, he provides himself with rational explanations for the things he sees in much the same way that Charles and Nicholas try to understand their own as well as others' behavior by ascribing rational explanations to them.

Related to David's need for a rational approach to life is his need to express everything verbally, to compartmentalize all experience within the boundaries of language. Language is certainly important, as any novelist will admit, but language cannot be a substitute for feeling. In an interview after the publication of The Ebony Tower, Fowles discusses David's use of language, calling it "a kind of smooth language … which is losing meaning" [Interview on The Today Show, NBC (11 November 1974)]. Breasley, on the other hand, is barely verbal, speaking for the most part in a kind of abbreviated language of fragments and phrases and communicating his important thoughts and feelings through his canvasses. Breasley can, however, use language effectively when necessary, as he demonstrates by means of a verbal attack upon David after dinner, drawing from him a symbolic "drop of blood." David mistakes the verbal wound for his initiation, thinking prematurely that he has passed the test. Unlike Gawain, the medieval quester who is similarly wounded by the Green Knight but who learns from the wound an important lesson, David has not learned anything yet except the art of carefully sidestepping an argument. In this case, however, he does not know how to respond to "the violently personal nature of the assault" Breasley mounts with such barbs as, "'You really a painter, Williams? Or just a gutless bloody word-twister?'," to which David replies, "'Hatred and anger are not luxuries we can afford anymore.'" This elicits further insults from Breasley who, by now quite drunk, explains to David that he is trying to tell him something important, although he confesses to his inadequacy with words (David's presumed strength). In his abbreviated style he summarizes: "'Don't hate, can't love. Can't love, can't paint…. Bloody geometry. No good. Won't work. All tried it. Down the hole.'" He concludes "with a strange lucidity": "'Ebony Tower. That's what I call it.'" The meaning of the term is not explained until later by the Mouse, who tells David that it signifies anything Breasley does not like about modern art, in particular the obscurity of artists who are afraid to be clear. Fowles elaborates on the meaning of the term:

I see the ebony tower as not so much an 'opposite' of the ivory one, as an inevitable consequence of it … if one stays too long in retreat in the sacred combe. Thus, a great deal of unnecessary 20th century 'obscurity' is a direct cultural result of 19th century ivory-towerism—art for art's sake, and so on. The trouble for me is not, so to speak, at the top—let us say, in the genius with which Mallarmé uses ambiguity and obscurity (and with undoubted sincerity in his greatest stuff); but the only-too-easy loophole it provides for the less gifted. Deliberately making your work incomprehensible is uncomfortably close to making it impossible to judge. [Letter from Fowles to Barnum, 5 August 1981]

David recognizes the creative powers in the old man, as evidenced in his canvasses, but fails to see their absence in his own art or life; he merely sees his existence as different from Breasley's, thinking the old man's self-imposed exile is based on the knowledge that "his persona would never wash in the Britain of the 1970s." He does, however, envy Breasley's lifestyle and success: "To someone like David, always inclined to see his own life (like his painting) in terms of logical process, its future advances dependent on intelligent present choices, it seemed not quite fair."

Logical process begins to break down within the mythic landscape as David realizes that much of what he is learning about Breasley cannot be put in his introduction because "like the forest itself, the old man had his antique mysteries." In the same vein, at a picnic in the woods with Breasley and the girls, he likens Coët to the Garden of Eden, seeing the place and its lifestyle as "faintly mythic and timeless." The Mouse concurs, telling David how she came to Coët: "'Bump. You're in a different world.'" He also is beginning to recognize more in the Freak's character than he previously realized, seeing in her look, which is "both questing and quizzing," a directness and gentleness that he previously missed, and thus recognizing an identity and a complimentarity between the two girls (as aspects of the anima archetype). Quickly, he feels drawn toward the three as a part of a living quaternity, which he completes, the result of which brings him an experience of the mandala archetype.

At the same time, David is feeling the influence of the Mouse in her role as the projection of the anima archetype:

He knew it and concealed it … not only to her, partly also to himself: that is, he analyzed what he had so rapidly begun to find attractive about her—why that precise blend of the physical and the psychological, the reserved and the open … called so strongly to something in his own nature. Strange, how these things hit you out of the blue, were somehow inside you almost before you could see them approaching. He felt a little bewitched, possessed; and decided it must be mainly the effect of being without Beth.

Several interesting points are revealed in this passage. One is that David recognizes the power of the Mouse as the anima archetype, even her power to bewitch or possess him, but he wants to analyze the situation so as to control it and to control the "something" it calls to in his nature: the anima within. In the midst of this analysis, a sentence intrudes in the second person where the sentences before and after are in the third person. Is this sentence, through the sudden use of "you," reflecting the voice of David's inner self, that which he seeks without knowing it? It speaks of the way "things hit you out of the blue" coming from "somewhere inside you," and it foreshadows the experience he will have with the Mouse in the garden. But the next sentence is safely back in the more distant third person as David attributes the strange things he is feeling to the absence of Beth, the projection of his persona.

Breasley, continuing in the archetypal role as David's guide, tells him that he does not provide answers to questions about his sources: "'Let it happen. That's all. Couldn't even tell you how it starts. What half it means. Don't want to know.'" Like Conchis in The Magus who tells Nicholas that "every answer is a form of death," Breasley is interested in life, not answers. Speaking of "trop de racine," he calls it "'too much root. Origin. Past. Not the flower. The now. Thing on the wall. Faut couper la racine. Cut the root off.'" His message for David is that too much reliance on the past, the root, stifles growth in the present, the flower. Although the present is connected to the root of the past, it cannot be chained to it; if this happens, one must cut the root off to save the flower.

The more David learns from Breasley in his capacity as teacher and guide and the Mouse in her capacity as anima, the more he feels drawn into the quest. There is, however, the danger of becoming too attached to the mythic realm, thus fearing to leave it. Such a fate has befallen the Mouse who sees Coët as the "'little forest womb … [where] everything remains possible.'" On the contrary, her possibilities for full growth cannot be realized as long as she stays within the protection of the domain. Part of David's task as mythic quester is to rescue her from her "forest womb" and provide her with safe passage back to the real world. David senses the challenge he faces:

He felt he had traveled much farther than expected, into the haunted and unpredicted; and yet in some strange way it seemed always imminent. It had had to come, it had had causes, too small, too manifold to have been detected in the past or to be analyzed now.

For once he does not analyze, accepting that he has come to the central task of his journey. As he is awakened to the anima within, seen as Diana, she is awakened to the animus, which she projects on David, and the moment in which they must act in acknowledgment of each other is fast approaching.

The moment is "here, now, the unsaid" as they move to the Edenic garden with its "ghostly apple trees." And still, although it is "his move," David cannot make it, withdrawing instead, under the influence of the shadow archetype, "into speech." Knowing his inadequacy, he wishes for "two existences," finding himself unable to be united into one whole existence and yet not wanting to forsake this moment. Thoughts of Beth and the world he has left behind freeze him in inaction while one half of him nevertheless yearns to incorporate Breasley's teachings through his actions, as he thinks:

Why deny experience, his artistic soul's sake, why ignore the burden of the old man's entire life? Take what you can. And so little: a warmth, a clinging, a brief entry into another body. One small releasing act. And the terror of it, the enormity of destroying what one had so carefully built.

Again his inner self speaks to him through the voice of the second person. Momentarily, the inner voice wins out and he takes Diana in his arms, but she, sensing his hesitation, pulls away, and he does not take her to him again, resorting instead to a fatherly kiss on the top of her head and ineffectual back-patting. From this point on, the struggle to regain a sense of the moment when all was potential is futile.

David has failed not only himself, by refusing to accept the anima within even after acknowledging its presence, but also Diana, by falling short of what she has needed to break the spell of Coët and facilitate her return to the real world. Thinking of his impending expulsion from the mythic landscape, he contemplates the ramifications of his failure, knowing that he cannot return, being "banned for life now." And worse than Adam, also banned for life from the Garden of Eden, he has left his Eve behind, the manifestation of the anima archetype in the person of Diana.

Leaving Coët, he runs over an object in the road. At first he thinks he has hit a mouse (an oblique reference to Diana, the Mouse) or a snake (a reference to the serpent in the Garden of Eden); but, on turning back, he discovers that he has hit a weasel, the same animal wounded in the tale of Eliduc, whose forest he now rides through. Fowles uses the weasel as a symbol that links the motif of his story with that of Eliduc. Unlike Eliduc, however, who successfully loved two women and whose tale demonstrates love as a connecting force. David cannot truly love either woman in his life. Thus, his tale demonstrates love as a dividing force since David is a divided man, caught between two worlds. Instead of being able to save the weasel that in Eliduc bears the life-restoring red flower, he kills it, and the blood that trickles from its mouth in the shape of the red flower now signifies his present psychic state of death without rebirth. The weasel's body is crushed but the head escapes, indicating the death of magic or creative powers with only the intellect or rational powers surviving.

The remainder of the story comprises David's analysis of his dilemma, not necessary for understanding the story's thesis, but in keeping with David's analytical character. He recognizes that fear, a manifestation of the shadow archetype, has prevented him from accepting the challenge of the quest, and he sees his art as reflecting his failure towards life: "You did not want how you lived to be reflected in your painting; or because it was compromised, so settled-for-the-safe, you could only try to camouflage its hollow reality under craftsmanship and good taste." Broadening the scope of his failure, David sees it as representative of his age. While Breasley is still connected to the past through a life-giving "umbilical cord," David and his contemporaries are "encapsulated in book knowledge." The authorial voice intones:

David and his generation, and all those to come, could only look back, through bars, like caged animals, born in captivity, at the old green freedom. That described exactly the experience of those last two days: the laboratory monkey allowed a glimpse of his lost true self.

As the mythic quester who quests for all, David is correct in seeing his failure as the failure of his age.

Yet, knowing that he has failed, he also knows that he will eventually forget his failure. The "wound" he has suffered will be covered by a scar, which in time will fade, leaving no trace; but until that moment comes, he will have to live with the realization that "he had refused (and even if he had never seen her again) a chance of a new existence, and the ultimate quality and enduringness of his work had rested on acceptance." Now in Paris he thinks of Coët as "in another universe" and he feels the loss of his paradise as "the most intense pang of the most terrible of all human deprivations; which is not of possession, but of knowledge." Fowles elaborates on David's predicament in an [unpublished] interview: "I meant simply that David knows after Coëtminais that his life will never be the same, but restricted by his new knowledge of himself. His dreams of himself are shipwrecked; but because he is decent he must learn to live with what he knows, with his newly revealed lacks and faults." A last urge in him toward salvation through knowledge is kept in check by "the tall shadow of him," his inability to break through the complacency and confinements, perhaps even decency, of his persona. David is not shadow-possessed, like Clegg in The Collector, but neither has he conquered the shadow.

In the last passage, which describes Beth's approach from the plane, Fowles switches from past to present tense in the same way he does in the last page of the revised version of The Magus. The major difference, however, is that in The Magus the present tense expresses the limitless possibility of the future awaiting Nicholas. For David, the present is an entrapping tense, keeping him frozen in failure because of his denial of the future. The passage reads: "She comes with the relentless face of the present tense…. He composes his face into an equal certainty"; it continues: "He has a sense of retarded waking, as if in a postoperational state of consciousness some hours returned but not till now fully credited; a numbed sense of something beginning to slip inexorably away."

In Fowles's use of the "postoperational state" to describe David's condition, we hear an echo of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in which the night is "spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table." Other images reinforce the connection with Prufrock, another quester who dares not meet the challenge of life because, like David, he is a divided man, suffering from what Eliot calls "dissociation of sensibility." Like Prufrock who "prepare[s] a face to meet the faces that you meet," David wears a persona that allows him to meet the faces he meets, particularly the face of his wife who now approaches. Also like Prufrock, who has "heard the mermaids singing, each to each," David has caught a liberating glimpse of life's potential at Coët, only to suffer Prufrock's fate when "human voices wake us, and we drown." In similar terms, Fowles describes David as one who "knows one dreamed, yet cannot remember. The drowning cry, jackbooted day." He wakes to reality, the human voices of the present drowning out the dream of the anima (which for Prufrock is symbolized by the mermaids' cry); and "he surrenders to what is left: to abstraction." Eliot's "dissociated" man, Prufrock, becomes Fowles's abstract man, David Williams. In response to his wife's implied question about the weekend, David says, "'I survived,'" a statement of hollow victory which concludes the novella and leaves us with the sinking sense of David's lost possibilities, his death-in-life in the eternal present, synonymous with Prufock's waking to drown. Had David succeeded in his quest, he would have done far more than survive: he would have lived.

The remaining stories in the collection are connected to the title story by the theme of lost opportunities. The sense of gloom that the ebony tower signifies becomes more pervasive, ending with the image of the dark cloud which overtakes the sun in the last story. In the first of these, "Poor Koko," the narrator's "ordeal," as he calls his encounter with the young thief who burns his writing, brings him the closest of the protagonists of the remaining stories to an understanding of his personal failure, but it leaves him helpless to do anything more than explain it. His quest for self-knowledge is not voluntarily sought but forced upon him by the unusual circumstance of the robbery and his desire to understand it.

The details of the experience that begin the writer's journey are these: having gone to the country to work on his manuscript, he is awakened by a young thief. They engage in an encounter that crosses generational as well as attitudinal lines and that culminates in the thief's burning the writer's manuscript, a seemingly incomprehensible act. Following the act comes an equally incomprehensible gesture: the thief's cocked thumb in the writer's face. His departure leaves the writer the task of understanding the incomprehensible while subjected to "the acrid smell, surely the most distressing of all after burnt human flesh, of cremated human knowledge." What, in effect, has happened is that the heart of the writer, his life's work, has been put to death, and he must now construct a new one grounded in an understanding of his relationship and responsibility towards other people.

The writer begins by analyzing the robber's last "cocked thumb" gesture. At the time of its occurrence, he saw it puzzlingly as a sign of mercy when there was no mercy shown. Later he establishes other meanings for the gesture—all inappropriate to the situation. Finally, after seeing the gesture used by a football player to signal courage to the crowd before the game begins, the writer interprets the thief's gesture as a warning to him: "a grim match was about to start and the opposing team he represented was determined to win." Hidden also in the gesture, as the writer analyzes it, is the thief's feeling that the odds are stacked in the writer's favor. Burning the papers begins the match.

The writer continues his analysis of the evening based on the linguistic implications of the thief's use of two words: "man" and "right." In the thief's frequent use of "man," the writer sees an attempt to bring them together within the family of man, while at the same time showing the vast differences that separate them. Through his use of "right" (with a question implied) he expresses his "underlying mistrust … of language itself." The writer, in his analysis, is, of course, expressing Fowles's view of the deterioration of language, a view he reiterates in discussing the story: "The point I was trying to make is that though I should like to see life become more simple in many (social) ways, language was not one of them" [Letter from Fowles to Barnum, 9 April 1980]. Thus, in the story, the young thief's frustration at the old man comes from his inability to use language to express himself and his anger at the old man's refusal to share the power of language with him. Understanding this, the old man writes, "I must very soon have appeared to the boy as one who deprived him of a secret—and one he secretly wanted to possess."

On a larger scale, the clash between the boy and the writer is seen as the clash between generations, between a world in which language is meaningful and one in which it is empty, stripped of its "magic" and "mystery" in the profound sense. The writer, again probably speaking as Fowles's mouthpiece, raises the conflict to a universal plane, seeing the problem as extending beyond this particular encounter to include television, the arts, social and political institutions, and the educational system. To strengthen the universal nature of the conflict, Fowles refrains from assigning names to the two main characters; they maintain their generalized roles as the old man and the boy, the writer and the thief. Even while their clash takes on universal proportions, it does not absolve the writer of his responsibility in the matter, which he sees as stemming from his "deafness." The deafness, while not specifically elucidated, is linked to the title of the story, which the writer explains is deliberately obscure. In illuminating its various meanings, he sheds light on the problem existing between himself and the boy, between his view of life and the boy's, between a world in which language and symbol have meaning and the present state of the world in which they do not. For example, when he asked friends to analyze the meaning of the title of his story, the consensus was that it derived from an unusual spelling for Coco the clown. On one level, as the writer explains, this is an accurate interpretation if the title refers to both participants and if "poor" carries its several meanings. However, as the writer continues, he had in mind koko, the Japanese word meaning "correct filial behavior, the proper attitude of son to father"; thus, the title means inadequate or inferior filial behavior, indicating the failure of the relationship between the "father" and "son" of the story. Further, the writer illuminates the meaning of the "incomprehensible epigraph" following the title, saying that it "shall have the last word, and serve as judgment on both father and son":

       Too long a tongue, too short a hand;
       But tongueless man has lost his land.

Inherent in the epigraph, now brought to light through the still viable powers of the old man, is the idea that language must serve to reach out from father to son but must at the same time be accompanied by human love, the "hand." For if man loses his language, the power of the word to communicate, he loses his heritage, his roots. The epigraph "comes with a sad prescience" from old Cornish, an extinct language without a land, since it may foreshadow the fate of English and other contemporary languages if the writer, as the representative "father," keeps his "tongue" to himself, refusing to communicate through his "hand" the love and spirit of the language as a reflection of heritage, "the land." The title of the story and its epigraph are obscure, as is the meaning of the boy's action toward the old man—each requires translation. But the question remains as to whether the writer's new-found understanding, forced on him through such unusual circumstances, can save his age from the fate of extinction. It certainly comes too late to save the boy or provide him with the foundation for a correct filial relationship based on love, understanding, and the old man's transference of the creative power of language.

In the succeeding story, "The Enigma," a mystery of a different kind is presented: the disappearance of John Marcus Fielding, prominent businessman, family man, Member of Parliament. Since the disappearance has no apparent criminal motivation, the question is raised as to why a man who seemed to have everything would want to abscond from life. The answer, as it is pieced together by hypothesis and conjecture, is that a life that seemed to offer a man everything in actuality provided him with an incurable feeling of emptiness; therefore, he set out to create his own mystery through his disappearance.

Since Fielding has disappeared before the story begins, the focus is on Sergeant Michael Jennings, whose life is connected to Fielding's by more than just the investigation. One of their connections involves their concern with keeping up appearances. Peter Fielding, the M.P.'s son, tells Jennings, "Maybe you don't know the kind of world I was brought up in. But its leading principle is never, never, never show what you really feel." Jennings is not much different, being described as one who took very good care indeed not to show his feelings when dealing with his peers and superiors on the force. He can just as easily "put on his public school manner" when addressing Mrs. Fielding. This ability to change face, that is, to assume the persona appropriate to the situation without revealing his true feelings, has served him well (as it has Fielding).

Another connection between Fielding and Jennings involves his attraction toward Isobel Dodgson, Peter's girl friend. At first sight of her, Jennings has "an immediate impression of someone alive, where everyone else has been dead, or playing dead; of someone who lived in the present, not the past." In her vitality, she serves as a potential anima figure for Jennings; and their meeting shifts the story's focus away from Fielding's disappearance to the developing relationship between Jennings and Isobel, such that the enigma now includes the young couple and the question of their future relationship. The conflict that caused Fielding to disappear soon manifests itself, however, in Jenning's relationship toward Isobel, whom he sees at first as fresh, independent, and not taken in by "the Sunday color-supplement view of values" which Fielding and his world represent, until she brings him abruptly down to earth with her crude statement about police brutality. His expectations dashed, Jennings feels "shocked more than he showed, like someone angling for a pawn who finds himself placed in check by one simple move." Disappointed unconsciously by her failure to live up to her potential as an anima figure for him, Jennings nevertheless feels himself consciously relieved to be returned to more familiar ground, now seeing Isobel as a sex object who appeals to him through the more familiar world of the senses.

Isobel is not easily categorized, however. When she tells Jennings her intuitions about Fielding, her ability to see "'someone else, behind it all,'" she demonstrates again her potential as anima, her ability to see a man whole (Sarah's and Alison's gift), but her potential remains undeveloped since she is as much a product of the contemporary wasteland as is Fielding or Jennings, and, like Jennings, is not on the mythic journey.

From a small detail that she has not divulged to previous investigators, Isobel weaves a story for Jennings that "explains" Fielding's disappearance. Jennings listens while at the same time trying to "calculate how far he could go with personal curiosity under the cover of official duty." As they talk, they discover, despite their different backgrounds, "a certain kind of unspoken identity of situation." In the pragmatic world in which they exist, "identity of situation" rather than identity of feeling forms the basis for a relationship. Still, he sees in her something different that speaks to something inside him, but he does not know how to attain it because he has lost the means of communication; he therefore falls back on sexual communication as the only avenue he knows, despite the fact that

something about her possessed something that he lacked: a potential that lay like unsown ground, waiting for just this unlikely corn-goddess; a direction he could follow, if she would only show it. An honesty, in one word. He had not wanted a girl so fast and so intensely for a long time. Nevertheless, he made a wise decision.

The allusion to Isobel as a corn-goddess relates her to the vegetative myths and the regeneration cycle. What Jennings seeks without knowing it is rebirth through the experience of the archetypes, here expressed as union with the anima, but he does not know how to journey toward such an experience and seeks direction from her. If she were serving in her potential capacity as anima, she might provide the direction he seeks, leading him to experience the archetypes and to approach wholeness. But she is not the anima; she only possesses the unrealized potential, as deeply locked inside her as it is in Jennings. His "wise decision" in its very nature reveals his inherent problem: decision does not produce archetypal encounter.

Isobel's "fiction" concludes open-endedly with Fielding's walking out. When prompted for a better ending, she says that the real author of the story is not she or anyone else, but the system: "'Something that had written him. Had really made him just a character in a book.'" Using an analogy that figures prominently in The French Lieutenant's Woman, Isobel describes Fielding as being "'like a fossil—while he's still alive.'" Trapped by the system that "limited" and "prevented" him from changing or evolving, he left it behind, thereby creating a sense of mystery his own life lacked. Of course, as Isobel tells her story about Fielding, she and Jennings, one cannot forget, are also characters in the story, just as much written by the system that defines them as is Fielding. Equally, they are products of Fowles's fiction, with Fowles using them and the various stories within the story to make a point about the condition of modern existence that "writes us" and denies us the freedom we need to take the mythic journey.

While Isobel tells her story, she is unconsciously tracing "invisible patterns" on the table top with her finger: "a square, a circle with a dot in it." What she traces is the archetype of the mandala, the circle-in-the-square pattern that indicates wholeness. [In an endnote, Barnum adds: "In a letter of 9 April, 1980, Fowles says that the circle with the dot 'was meant to be the universal printer's symbol for full stop, or period. The square, a space or paragraph symbol. But I will now claim your interpretation as conscious!'"] Significantly, Isobel's patterns are invisible, unrecognized by the pair as they discuss a man who, lacking wholeness and the creative powers of archetypal encounter, has killed himself. Jennings, now only referred to as "the sergeant," takes no notice of Isobel's patterns, wondering instead if she is naked beneath her dress. Meanwhile, Isobel raises "the pattern-making finger" and concludes, "'Nothing lasts like a mystery.'" The finger which draws the pattern of the mandala but does not contain its power is the finger that points to the crux of Fielding's dilemma: life without mystery cannot be endured. Since Fielding, along with Isobel and the sergeant, lacks mystery in his life in the sacred sense, provided through an attachment to meaningful rituals and symbols, he can only attain mystery in the profane sense, created by his own disappearance and described in Isobel's story.

In similar fashion, Isobel and the sergeant create their own mystery in their budding relationship. What they are now faced with is not the solution to Fielding's mystery but the solution to the mystery between them, which the sergeant sees as still another "test," both "test" and "mystery" being used in the limited, non-mythic sense. Fowles writes, "The point was a living face with brown eyes, half challenging and half teasing; not committing a crime against that." The "crime" is not committed in that they plan to continue the relationship, but the language Fowles employs to describe their "first tomorrow" has a distinctly criminal cast when the sergeant "deprive[s]" her of her clothes, finding her "defenseless underneath, though hardly an innocent victim in what followed" italics mine). Since they are both consenting adults desirous of the anticipated sexual encounter, the criminal language Fowles employs is humorously ironic. Isobel and the sergeant create their own mystery on the sensual level, and while it does not lead to archetypal encounter since they are not on the mythic journey, it is not unpleasurable and provides some respite from the sterility of the wasteland. As the concluding sentence of the story attests: "The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean—indeed it can only cause them, and then walk out." Although the two characters that remain do not take the mythic journey, whose potential has been hinted at but never realized, they do achieve a union of sorts which is "tender" even while being pragmatic. The flesh provides a poetry of its own, and it will have to suffice since it appears to be all that remains. Instead of clearing up the enigma of Fielding's disappearance, Fowles provides us with a new enigma, inherent in the last sentence with its deliberately ambiguous pronouns. Fowles, himself, may shed meaning on the story if we consider his words in The Magus: "To view life as a detective story, as something that could be deduced, hunted and arrested, was no more realistic (let alone poetic) than to view the detective story as the most important literary genre, instead of what it really was, one of the least." Perhaps Fowles is telling us that the detective story part of "The Enigma" is of less importance than the more "poetic" story between Jennings and Isobel. If that is the case, the conclusion to the story, which is no conclusion but a new beginning, will have to suffice since in the age of antimyth—the setting for this story and others in the volume—mystery in the sense of enigma is all that remains. Or, as John B. Humma writes [in "John Fowles' The Ebony Tower: In the Celtic Mood," Southern Humanities Review (1983)], "The Spillanesque winding-up (detective beds heroine) may seem to trivialize a serious story otherwise, but it is in keeping with the genre. Moreover, 'the tender pragmatisms of flesh' which Jennings achieves with Isobel counterpoint all that is lost by David Williams, who had hung back at his portal."

"The Cloud," the last story in the collection, continues the motif of the collection in its descent toward darkness. It begins by painting a picture of a summer day, "vivid with promise," but the participants are divided into sun and shadow, hinting from the start the breakdown in communication that is part of the story's thesis. Further, the two women described in the opening paragraph are lying "stretched as if biered," a description which introduces the image of death that dominates by the end of the story. The two men, Peter and Paul, have no connection to the wisdom of the apostles (although Peter is called "Apostle Peter"); their actions are futile and pointless for the most part. The scene even includes a snake which frightens the children, but of which Peter says philosophically, "'Proves it's paradise, I suppose.'" All is not Edenic, however much the aura of a "different world" is suggested; the participants are divided from each other and themselves and find themselves strangers in paradise. The crux of the problem is stated by one of the voices (possibly Catherine's):

What one lost, afterward, was what one had never had strongly at the best of times: a sense of continuity…. So now everything became little islands, without communication, without farther islands to which this that one was on was a stepping-stone, a point with point, a necessary stage. Little islands set in their own limitless sea, one crossed them in a minute, in five at most, then it was a different island but the same: the same voices, the same masks, the same emptiness behind the words. Only the moods and settings changed a little; but nothing else. And the fear was both of being left behind and of going on: of the islands past and the islands ahead.

We are again in the land where no one ever goes beneath the level of the persona, where people meet only in masks. In this existence, actions have no meaning because man is going nowhere, having lost his sense of a past and finding himself without hope for the future. It is the age of anti-myth, the world of the wasteland. Yet the voice continues, asking to be proven wrong, to be surprised, to be provided with something or someone to "string the islands together again." But the narrative structure, islands of thought breaking from present into past tense and back again, moving from person to person without continuity, echoes the thesis of the story. Fowles strengthens that thesis through his inclusion of a section from The Waste Land: "Hurry up please it's time. Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight. Goonight," by means of which he connects Eliot's theme of the breakdown of communication in the wasteland world to his own.

Within this wasteland world, Catherine, the tragic figure of the piece, can relate least well to the others in the group and is incapable of maintaining the persona of happiness they wear, having succumbed to the archetype of the shadow in its manifestation as despair. Her view of life is contrasted with the others. Paul, for instance, exemplifies "decency, mediocrity, muddling through"; he copes with the future by continually "trying." Annabel, his wife, is the "presiding mother-goddess," although "slightly blowsy," indicating her connection with an ancient tradition but one that is greatly reduced in the contemporary world. While there is talk among them, the failure of language is as evident here as it is in Eliot's poem. Life in this wasteland full of the "tired rush of evening people, work drained automata" is life after "the harvest is in. All that's left are the gleanings and leasings: fragments, allusions, fantasies, egos. Only the husks of talk, the meaningless aftermath." The image of the harvest, traditionally associated with the vegetative myth of regeneration, now offers no hope for a new harvest to follow: only the "husks of talk" remain, language without the living symbol.

There remains, however, the power of the story, the repository of myth. Catherine is coaxed by her niece Emma into telling her a story about a princess. As Catherine creates her story of the lonely, sad princess, she also creates her own future (in much the same way that Fielding does in "The Enigma"), finding a myth she can become a part of. The story ends with the princess waiting for the return of the prince who has abandoned her, but with whom she will be reunited soon. As Emma returns to the picnickers, Catherine contemplates death, the future she had created for herself in the fairy tale. Like the princess in the tale, she fears men and can find no one to trust and love, since the man she loved committed suicide. Thus, like Prince Florio, he has gone away, but he returns as Smiling Death, "alive, almost fleshed; just as intelligent, beckoning." In a last, meaningless act and under the influence of the shadow archetype, she dryly seduces Peter who has come upon her on his walk away from the others. [In an endnote, Barnum adds: "Fowles gives his view of the act as 'not necessarily a final act of despair—at least possibly one of exorcizing self-disgust. It came to me first as that.' Letter from Fowles, 5 August, 1981."]

Afterwards, Peter descends from the hills and, like the apostle for whom he is named, denies Catherine, claiming not to have seen her, as the Apostle Peter descended from the Mount of Olives and claimed not to have known Christ. Because he does not tell the others that he has been with Catherine, they leave her to her fate, assuming she has gone ahead. As they emerge into the clearing, they see "a mysterious cloud," which seems "feral and ominous, a great white-edged gray billow beginning to tower over the rocky wall, unmistakable bearer of heavy storm." The picnickers depart, "the princess calls [through the cry of the bird of Catherine's story], but there is no one, now, to hear her," as Catherine has apparently given in to her despair and committed suicide. [In an endnote, Barnum adds: "Curiously, Fowles says that he did not necessarily mean that Catherine commits suicide, remarking, 'If she dies, who tells the story?' Letter from Fowles, 5 August, 1981."] Only the black cloud remains to roll over the deserted meadow.

The dark mood introduced in the first story by the symbol of the ebony tower is now transformed into the symbol of the dark cloud. The characters in this collection of stories have failed, for the most part, in their lives because they have not reached out and communicated to their fellow man the love that is needed to turn the wasteland into the garden. David Williams sees what life lacks but is incapable of changing it; the old writer in "Poor Koko" learns through his failure to communicate with the young thief what the failure of language means for the future; the M.P. of "The Enigma" disappears in an attempt to create a mystery that is lacking in his meaningless existence, and we are left with "the tender pragmatisms of flesh" that form the basis for the relationship between the sergeant and the girl; and Catherine in "The Cloud," having lost love and despairing of ever finding it again, commits suicide.

Although the general tone of these stories is dark, Fowles's view of life is not one of despair, as his novels The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and Daniel Martin attest, each treating protagonists who break out of wasteland existences into self-awareness and understanding because of their ability to take the mythic journey. As Robert K. Morris writes [in "A Forest of Fictions," The Nation (13 September 1975)]:

Fowles's intent as a novelist, and as a writer of these fictions, is to strike the sane balance between art and life at a time when both seem vulnerable to excess, and neither seems susceptible to control. Perhaps only when art descends from the ebony tower will it be able to light up Fowles's cheerless 'bottomless night' and once more tell us, as it has in the past, something about life.

Through the stories in The Ebony Tower, Fowles sounds a warning by showing us the despair inherent in contemporary life if we cannot take the journey out of the darkness toward wholeness and individuation.